Rewriting History

This is great fun, if you are 12 or 13, or if you read it as
fantasy, but I have to wonder about the reviewers. Kirkus called the
book "well researched"—on ships, perhaps, but not, I think, on
probability theory, or even human development. Unless she falls off a
mast or a spar or a bowsprit, Charlotte will be 14, then 15...and then
what?

Catherine, Called Birdy (a 1995 Newbery Honor Book), by Karen
Cushman, is a brave excursion into medieval social history through the
diary of a 14-year-old who questions nearly everything that governed
the lives of medieval people in general and of women in particular.
Birdy's world seems real enough—it is rough and dirty and
uncomfortable most of the time, even among the privileged classes. Her
feisty independence is perhaps believable, as is her objection to being
"sold like a parcel" in marriage to add to her father's status or land.
However, those were the usual considerations in marriage among the
land-holding classes, for sons as well as daughters, and Birdy's
repeated resistance might have drawn much harsher punishment than she
got. The 15th-century Paston letters record what happened to a daughter
who opposed her mother about a proposed match: "She has since Easter
[three months before this letter] been beaten once in the week or
twice, sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three
places." As the historian of the Paston papers points out, "The idea
that children...had any natural rights was almost impossible to a
medieval mind. Children were just chattels...entirely at the direction
and disposal of their fathers." If this attitude applied to sons, it
applied even more to daughters.

Cushman sticks to historical reality while Birdy considers and
discards the few alternatives to marriage she can think
of—running away, becoming a goatkeeper, joining a monastery. But
once her heroine agrees (for altruistic reasons) to her father's final,
awful choice for her, Cushman quickly supplies an exit. The intended
husband dies, so Birdy can marry his son, who, fortunately, is heir to
the land and thereby meets her father's purposes. The son is, of
course, young and educated where his father was old, ugly, and
illiterate. Even granting that life is unpredictable, so fortuitous an
escape strains the framework. In fairness, I think Cushman knew this;
she just flinched at consigning her likable character to her likely
fate.

And therein lies the difficulty I find with these—and many
other—historical novels of the past 20 years. They evade the
common realities of the societies they write about. In the case of
novels about girls or women, authors want to give their heroines freer
choices than their cultures would in fact have offered. To do that,
they set aside the social mores of the past as though they were minor
afflictions, small obstacles, easy—and painless—for an
independent mind to overcome.

In the case of novels about girls or women, authors want to give
their heroines freer choices than their cultures would in fact have
offered.

To see authors vaulting blithely over the barriers women lived with for
so long brings to mind Anna Karenina. Anna's is the story these
contemporary writers don't want to tell. When she left her husband and
child for Vronsky, Anna suffered all the sanctions her society imposed
on women who defied its rules. Whether the reader, or, for that matter,
the author, believed that the rules were unfair or the sanctions too
harsh is irrelevant. Tolstoy was telling the story of a woman who lived
when and where she lived, who made the choices she made and who was
destroyed by the consequences.

It isn't that contemporary writers of historical fiction do not
research the topics and the times they have chosen. They do, and they
often include information about those facts and about the sources they
have used. Yet many narratives play to modern sensibilities. Their
protagonists experience their own societies as though they were
time-travelers, noting racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and outmoded
beliefs as outsiders, not as people of and in their cultures. So Birdy,
though she approaches her first experience with Jews with all the
outlandish prejudices of her society, overcomes them instantly. So
Sarah insists on wearing overalls when it suits her, and her future
husband accepts not only this, but all her nonconformities, without
question, let alone objection. A ship crew's acquiescence to a
13-year-old girl's decision to join them as a working sailor—in
1832—hardly needs comment.

And so, too, Ann Rinaldi's novel about the 1692 Salem witch
hysteria, A Break With Charity (1992), in which all the
significant characters are outsiders, one way or another, and all hold
views closer to 20th- rather than to 17th-century norms. No sympathetic
character in this novel really believes in witches, though many
17th-century people did. Cotton Mather—who indeed took witchcraft
seriously—appears once, wrapped in a black cloak, an onlooker at
one of the hangings and the embodiment of evil. Puritanism was, and is,
an ambiguous, complex, enduring influence on American culture; to
picture it as simply evil or alien is to ignore the historical
truth.

Didacticism dies hard in children's literature. Today's publishers,
authors, and reviewers often approach historical fiction for children
as the early 19th century did—as an opportunity to deliver
messages to the young. Bending historical narrative to modern models of
social behavior, however, makes for bad history, and the more specific
the model, the harder it is to avoid distorting historical reality. The
current pressure to change old stereotypes into "positive images" for
young readers is not only insistent but also highly specific about what
the desirable image is, and often untenable. If the only way a female
protagonist can be portrayed is as strong, independent, and outspoken,
or, to take a different example, if slaves must always be shown as
resistant to authority, and if these qualities have to be overt,
distortion becomes inevitable. Betty Sue Cummings' novel about the
American Civil War, Hew Against the Grain (1977), establishes
her heroine's strength as a credible result of wartime conditions. Her
picture of slavery, however, is less easily reconciled with history.
How many slaves this Virginia family owns is not clear, but the four
described in any detail are all free-thinking and
outspoken—"Elijah neither looked nor acted like a
slave"—and the two younger ones, at least, can read. The odds
against such a situation in Virginia on the eve of the Civil War were
considerable. More important, however politically acceptable it is,
this kind of idealization glosses over the real price slaves paid for
slavery.

Today's publishers, authors, and reviewers often approach
historical fiction for children as the early 19th century
did—as an opportunity to deliver messages to the
young.

What is at stake here is truth. It can't, of course, be true, and
wasn't, that all or even most slaves and women rebelled openly, let
alone successfully, against the legal and social limitations put upon
them. Moreover, resistance takes a variety of forms, not all of them
straightforward, some of them not even conscious. A literature about
the past that makes overt rebellion seem nearly painless and nearly
always successful indicts all those who didn't rebel: It implies,
subtly but effectively, that they were responsible for their own
oppression.

Strength, too, has more than one face. As Louisa May Alcott judged
it when she wrote Little Women, Mrs. March was a powerful
figure, well in control of herself and what the 19th century called the
"woman's sphere." Today's feminism understandably disparages Marmee's
kind of power, but that doesn't change the fact that it existed.
Writers who impose 20th-century formula feminism on narratives set in
the 1860s only ensure that readers will not learn what readers of
Little Women learn about the structures and strategies of
19th-century society.

Formulas deny the complexity of human experience and often the
reality of it, as well. Most people in most societies are not rebels;
in part because the cost of nonconformity is more than they want to
pay, but also because as members of the society they share its
convictions. Most people are, by definition, not exceptional.
Historical fiction writers who want their protagonists to reflect
20th-century ideologies, however, make them exceptions to their
cultures, so that in many a historical novel the reader learns nearly
nothing—or at least nothing sympathetic—of how the people
of a past society saw their world. Characters are divided into
right—those who believe as we do—and wrong; that is, those
who believe something that we now disavow. Such stories suggest that
people of another time either understood or should have understood the
world as we do now, an outlook that quickly devolves into the belief
that people are the same everywhere and in every time, draining human
history of its nuance and variety.

But people of the past were not just us in odd clothing. They were
people who saw the world differently; approached human relationships
differently; people for whom night and day, heat and cold, seasons and
work and play had meanings lost to an industrialized world. Even if
human nature is much the same over time, human experience, perhaps
especially everyday experience, is not. To wash these differences out
of historical fictions is not only a denial of historical truth but
also a failure of imagination and understanding that is as important to
the present as to the past.

Web Only

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.